If you were locked in a room with a whiteboard and plenty of RockStar Energy Drink and told to develop a social bookmark/discussion auto-posting site from scratch and to spend as little as possible doing it, what would you come up with?  (Ok, you can have a bathroom in the locked room so you can concentrate.)

You'd probably wind up with many of the features of these guys:

• Ekstreme's Socializer
• OnlyWire
• Social Bookmarker
• Social Poster
• Post Toaster

The features you’d want but end up discarding (cost, time, complexity) are probably:

• Workflow
• Database driven profiles
• Robust error reporting

What you’d end up with would be: 

• Direct post to URL
• Framing of sites or script generation
• Good UI

So far, so good.  Do you think you’d forget to:

• Have a privacy policy?
• Produce a TOS?
• Deploy a monetization plan?

Seriously, people, of the five sites above, only one, OnlyWire, had a TOS and a Privacy Policy.  And only one, Post Toaster, had an obvious monetization motivation.

Why are TOS and Privacy Policies Important?

OnlyWire’s TOS says they can use your logins to post a link to their site in your social bookmarking accounts, and their Privacy Policy gives them the right to send you commercial email.  Nice.  But at least it’s written down and you know (if you read it).

The others?  Can they legally deploy javascript phone-home code in their iFrames?  Sure.  (They don’t, I looked, but they could.)  Can they grab your content and use it?  Why not, you’re pasting it into their site.  And so on.

Why is Monetization Important?

Hobbies are great, and I plan to have one someday.  But if someone is maintaining a site as a hobby, then one day you’ll go to use it and it won’t be there.  I much prefer to know that my interests and the site owners are in alignment.

You may well say that you don’t have very much invested, so it’s no big deal to have it go away.  Well, maybe so, but I have posted 20+ articles to at least a hundred websites in the past few weeks using these services and it is not so easy to move from one to another.

Which leads me to……

What About the Missing Stuff?

Workflow, my kingdom for workflow.  And a database backend please, just like we figured out in the 80’s. 

If you are going to run one blog and write two articles a week and post it to digg, propeller, reddit, and delicious, then, well, maybe lightweight stuff will save you some time.

But I think a much more common profile is that we have several sites/blogs and possibly two or more "identities’"(not sock puppets, just different friend groups and different posting habits).  A lot of people here have work they do for clients.  More identities.

And more content posted to different sites in different ways under different logins.

I wrote a post the other day and described post-it-notes as a gateway drug for Excel.  I still think that is true, but I think a database backend is like rehab.  No fooling, I know I spend a lot of time cursing at what our database can’t supply me when I need to do client billing, but if I had to rely on Excel for everything, I’d go mad.

And I think that if I wanted to use these free tools, without database support, as a primary prop in my SEO strategy, I’d live behind a Maginot Line of spreadsheets forever.

So, What is the Solution?

I think the trick is to not just deploy and stop development.  It’s good to get stuff out there and experiment with your audience and look for things that work and get feedback.  I’d hope that these sites continue to evolve, but given the startling lack of monetization I have trouble seeing someone making the investment.

Do You Use Any of These Sites?

I’d be very interested to hear if you’ve done anything serious with these sites.  You can PM me, leave a comment, whatever.